School Choices

Almost everybody who knows me asks the same question when we meet again:

Your girl is taking her PSLE this year right? How is the preparation?

My reply is always the same: stressful, because my kid is not stressed.

I don't know which idiot decided on this, but the school has never spelt out the class and standard positions of children in their report books, since P1.

The only feedback the school gives on the child's academic performance is using percentile.

They issue this piece of information on which your child's results for each subject is collated, and they tell you your child falls in the 0 - 20 / 20 - 40 / 40 - 60 / 60 - 80 / 80 - 100 percentile of the cohort. In short, the higher your percentile, the better you are eg. if you are in the 60 - 80 percentile, it means your result for that subject is the same as or better than 60 - 80 percent of the cohort.

I don't fancy this type of feedback because the information is limited.

We need to know exactly where my child stands in the class and the cohort so that she has a target to work towards to ie. she ranks 25th in class now, she should strive to be 20th. Unfortunately, the school does not provide such information, so there is no specific target for my child to work towards to. The percentile thing is just too vague. My child is in the 40 - 60 percentile. Er ... is she in the 40th percentile or is she in the 60th percentile? It doesn't give enough information for a child to set her targets.

Worse still, the school has a few classes of children who did well enough to get through the first round of Gifted Programme but not the second round, they decided to label these children as 'high-achieving' and put them in three classes and have mostly promoted them en-bloc among the 3 classes from P4 to P6. The rest of the 'medium-achieving' classes would be promoted likewise. Some parents from the 'MA' classes had enquired if their children could be promoted into the 'HA' classes if they managed to catch up with time, but apparently, the school feels that the potential of the HA children is ascertained by a very refined, tried-and-tested test when they were 8 or 9 years old. I can't remember how it was phrased, but it was made known that the MA children, no matter how well they do, would not be placed in the same class as HA children. However, the MA children who eventually do very well would be grouped together in a class.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I am glad that Coco gets to be promoted alongside with the HA children; on the other hand, I feel that such a system creates complacency, because subsequently, there is no need to put in effort to get into a better class.

My father has said that Coco is so stress-less because she has given up on catching up. According to him, I should have put Coco in a neighbourhood school so that she stands a chance at being the top student - you know, the big-fish-small-pond and small-fish-big-pond theory?

I have given some thoughts to this at different juncture. I did think about this before she went to P1.

I had decided that she would be a small fish in a big pond.

There are different stories to the theory. Some had said that being a big fish in a small pond was good for their children as their confidence was greatly boosted, others said that a girl or two had thought she was very good since she was the top student in her school, but she became demoralised and depressed when she went to a top secondary school and was shocked to find that there are many others who were better than she was.

I have to return to my original intent when I decided to place Coco where she is now:

1) To allow her to be in a Chinese-majority environment
It is not about racial discrimination. I had come from an all-Chinese primary school and I feel that there are benefits to it. Some benefits are beyond word-description as they are more subconscious. Others are: less likely to be clique-kish since young and promotes competitive spirit. For some reason, Chinese are more competitive than other races.

2) Less likely to have disruption

i) Some neighbourhood schools tend to take in students more indiscriminately as they are more 'needy' of numbers. Some students who have special needs, and ought to be in special schools are in neighbourhood schools because of various reasons: the parents are in denial, or afraid that their children might be stigmatised or ostracised and refuse to send the children to special schools; the fees at special schools are too high for the parents to pay; there is no vacancy at special schools; special schools refuse to admit the children for various reasons.

So these children end up in neighbourhood schools. They disrupt the lessons on a daily basis. Children in the classroom watch free dramas every day as the child fights with other children, or fights with teachers. Teachers need to channel their energy to classroom management more often than teaching itself.

ii) The next reason may not be true or valid, but it's an inkling that I get: that Coco's school is less likely to insert relief or temporary teachers for curriculum teaching.

We all know of schools that have frequent change of teachers, or teachers who simply absent themselves for weeks in the course of teaching, leaving the children stranded on an academic island and affecting their studies badly.

I have a gut feeling that Coco's school is less inclined to do that for fear of complaints.

3) Coco would have to be the top 1st or 2nd if she were to be in a neighbourhood school to stand a good chance, or any chance at all, to get into a decent secondary school.

To me, that's harder than being among the possible 175 (approx) to get a good T-score at PSLE.

4) It's very far-fetched I know, but it was at the back of my mind when I decided to enrol her: her own children would be able to get into the school via an early phase next time.

I cannot imagine what would happen or how competitive it would get when it is her turn to do the P1 registration when we are experiencing craze at least 25 years ahead of her time.

Even decent neighbourhood schools see crazy balloting for the places. I was so tensed and worried during her P1 registration myself especially when hers was a baby-boom year. If we had to ballot, I was sure we would never get it if we had counted on my luck!


I will never know how Coco would have fared if she had gone to the school down my block. She might have been a prefect, might have been perfect, might have excelled, might have turned out to be very disciplined, might have been more competitive ... but I have made my choice based on the best information available to me at that point in time. I would have made the same choice if I could go back in time.

When my colleagues and bosses knew that I wanted to apply for no-pay leave to study with Coco, quite a few approached me and told me this: we all know that it's the child's attitude that determines how she does. So Coco might have the same kind of laid-back attitude towards studies even if she had gone to a neighbourhood school, and chances of it happening is higher because many children in the environment are equally, if not more, laid-back.

Have I ever doubted my decision in sending her to her current school? Sure.

Have I regretted sending her there? Never.